English

Monitoring Volatile Evolution in Disrupting Comet D/2021 A1 (Leonard) with NOEMA and APEX

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics 2026-04-14 v2

Abstract

We report a pre-perihelion survey of volatile emissions from comet D/2021 A1 (Leonard) with the Northern Extended Millimeter Array (NOEMA; UT 2021 Nov. 5, 21, and Dec. 1) and the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX; UT 2021 Dec. 9-10), spanning heliocentric distances (rHr_H) from 1.3 to 0.80 au. We securely detected HCN and CS and place 3σ\sigma upper limits on CH3_3OH, H2_2CO, and CO abundances. Line kinematics and NOEMA spatial constraints indicate that HCN was released at or near the nucleus (parent scale length <300<300 km), while CS showed higher gas expansion velocities and mixing ratios that increased with decreasing rHr_H - consistent with production from a distributed source. Across our campaign, CS mixing ratios relative to H2_2O increased by a factor of \sim5, from 0.02±0.01%0.02 \pm 0.01\% at rHr_H = 1.3 au to 0.10±0.02%0.10\pm0.02\% by rHr_H = 0.80 au. HCN mixing ratios in our data rose modestly, from 0.04±0.02%0.04 \pm 0.02\% at rHr_H = 1.3 au to 0.07±0.02%0.07 \pm 0.02\% by rHr_H = 0.81 au. However, contemporaneous measurements from other facilities placed HCN consistently at a higher absolute level ( ⁣0.08%\sim\!0.08\%) with additional variability. Once cross-facility measurements were included, the HCN abundance showed no statistically robust monotonic dependence on rHr_H. Variability in both species during the mid-December outbursts and fragmentation suggests that D/2021 A1's volatile evolution reflected not only solar insolation but also disruption processes, underscoring the value of multi-epoch, multi-instrument monitoring to capture rapid, species-dependent changes.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.02613,
  title  = {Monitoring Volatile Evolution in Disrupting Comet D/2021 A1 (Leonard) with NOEMA and APEX},
  author = {Timothy N. Proudkii and Nathan X. Roth and Jérémie Boissier and Dominique Bockelée-Morvan and Nicolas Biver and Steven B. Charnley and Stefanie N. Milam and Martin A. Cordiner and Michael A. DiSanti and Boncho P. Bonev and Neil Dello Russo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.02613},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

21 pages, 7 figures, accepted to PSJ